The Post-Tourist Mirror

Abstract

This thesis consists of a major installation and an exegesis that arose out of my interest in the notion of “post-tourism”—how travellers increasingly avoid seeing themselves or being seen as conventional “mass tourists”, choosing instead to adopt a slightly distanced, often ironic position. “Becoming post-tourist”, in John Urry’s (2002) analysis, means taking pleasure in a range of “tourists games” (p. 91). These are people who parody, critique or otherwise reconfigure how they intervene in the sites and experiences of tourism, and enjoy the challenges of not being tourists. I wondered how my arts practice, initially based in photography, might intervene in the experiences of tourism and post-tourism to invite people to enter into a more reflective, reflexive and critical set of engagements with their own cultural and cross-cultural encounters. I quickly recognised that such a project would require me to extend my practice into a more complex terrain of site specific installation in which I could bring together still and moving imagery, objects and architectural interventions with notions of spatiality. This involved re-engineering a gallery to provide means by which people encountering the work would become participants in the investigation and the production of a sense of becoming post-tourist. Thus, while continuing to work with still and moving photography, I carried that work through into a broader “materiality” of installation. I have presented the creative outcome of my research as series of interwoven spatial encounters that deal with the negotiation and renegotiation of complex and contested contemporary histories and geographies, time and space, subjectivities and identities that are engaged with in the contexts of travel.